Serious Men (12 page)

‘Yes. But its capital is not Geneva.’

‘What is the capital of Switzerland?’

‘B-e-r-n-e’.

‘You are a very clever boy.’

‘I am a genius.’

Ayyan looked at Adi, a bit concerned for a moment, but when the boy returned the stare both of them burst out laughing.

‘Why do countries have capitals?’ Adi asked.

‘Because every country wants to say this is the most important city in our place.’

‘But don’t other cities feel bad?’

‘No. Do you think Bombay feels bad it’s not the capital?’

‘Yes.’

Adi muttered the name of every car that was passing by. ‘Esteem, Skoda, Fiat, Accent, Accent, Baleno, Accent,’ he was saying. He fell silent for about a minute.

‘Say, “Decimal system”,’ his father said. ‘D-e-c-i-m-a-l s-y-s-t-e-m.’

‘That’s easy,’ Adi said, but a look of concentration came to his face. ‘Decimal system,’ he said slowly.

At the iron gates where the security guard stared at the backs of young mothers, Adi let go of his father’s hand and ran to his class. Ayyan made his way to meet the fierce Salesian Principal. Sister Chastity looked surprised to see him. ‘Something wrong?’ she asked. (She always hoped something was wrong in the lives of married people.)

‘It’s something the boy has done,’ Ayyan said.

Sister Chastity went through the news report. In the brief silence that followed, Ayyan could hear the distant murmurs of a class where the teacher was probably delayed. Sister Chastity’s moustache had grown a bit darker, he thought. He caught a glimpse of Christ in the background: Christ, whose heart was on fire and whose munificent eyes reminded him of the woman who had stepped out of the pastry shop yesterday evening.

Sister Chastity lifted her head and inhaled thoughtfully. ‘This boy,’ she said kindly, ‘What has this boy done? I see his picture. But I am sorry, I cannot read Marathi. I can read Hindi and even French, but not Marathi. The script is the same as Hindi you know but some words …’

Ayyan translated the story for her. ‘This boy,’ she said shaking
her head. ‘I am going to put it on the notice-board right away. Praise the Lord! I wish the report had mentioned St Andrew’s, Worli. You know, there are so many schools called St Andrew’s. Praise the Lord!’ She stared at him for a moment and said, ‘I see, Mr Mani, you don’t praise the Lord.’

‘Oh – Praise the Lord.’

‘Please don’t feel compelled to say these things.’

‘Not at all. Lord is lord. Nothing Christian about it,’ he said.

‘Him, not it.’

‘Him.’

‘What if I meant it as a very Christian thing. Would you have still said, “Praise the Lord”?’ she asked.

‘Of course. God is one. Hindu god, Christian god – all the same thing.’

‘The same one?’

‘The same one.’

‘Yes,’ Sister Chastity said sadly. ‘People say that. People say many things. But I am sure you like the sound of “Christ is the true Lord”. There is something about it?’

‘Yes, there is something about it, but a lawyer was telling me a few months ago that it is against the Indian constitution to say “Christ is the true Lord”.’

‘What matters, Mr Mani, is the human constitution.’

‘I don’t understand, Sister.’

‘It’s all right. A day like this, Mr Mani, when your son is showing signs of a great future, isn’t it time for you to consider how the boy’s spiritual life is going to be?’

‘I am too dazed today.’

‘I understand. But sooner or later, the Lord will make a decision for you.’

‘His mother is happy with Buddhism right now.’

‘But Buddhism is a philosophy, Mr Mani. Christianity is a religion. Christ said everything that Buddha said and much more. Buddha stopped at the Peepal tree. Christ went all the way.’

‘Yes, but his mother is …’

‘I know, I know,’ Sister Chastity said. ‘I’ve tried talking to her. She just keeps quiet and pretends to be dumb when I try to give her Christ. Once she told me she felt like a Hindu. What a terrible thing to say! After all the atrocities her ancestors and your ancestors suffered, she still wants to follow that religion.’

‘You know how she is,’ Ayyan said, trying to look disappointed.

‘Yes, yes, but you’re a very intelligent man. You are the father of a genius. You have groomed your son so well. Isn’t it time you wondered how you are going to support his future?’

‘I think I’ll manage.’

‘Education is very expensive, Mr Mani,’ she said making a sorrowful face and leaning back on her chair. ‘Christians get discounts. As a financially backward Christian, you will be eligible for many benefits. You know that. I am just saying this as a concerned educator. I am not even implying that you should accept Jesus for the monetary rewards that will certainly come your way if you do that.’

Somewhere in the school, Gloria Fernandes, her throat parched at the very thought of having to teach this class, said in her singsong way, ‘Thirteen ones are thirteen.’ And the class chanted after her. She kept a cautious eye on a boy in the front row. She had a bad feeling today. ‘Thirteen twos are twenty-six,’ Gloria said. The boy lifted his hand.

‘What is it now, Adi?’

‘Why do we learn only the decimal system?’ the boy asked. ‘Why not the binary system?’

A
YYAN
M
ANI STARED
at the Thought For The Day on the blackboard and was momentarily hypnotized by the power of the written word.

Ayyan was tempted to write another invented quote. That would be risky. He usually inserted only one phoney quote every week or so. That way his subversive abuse of the Brahmins would not attract too much attention. But that morning he could not resist the temptation. He pretended to look into a piece of paper and wrote a fresh thought:

When he turned to leave, he saw Oparna Goshmaulik reading the Thought For The Day. ‘Who is Vallumpuri John?’ she asked.

Ayyan shook his head and looked up to ascribe blame.

‘Dr Acharya cannot be asking you to write the Thought For The Day,’ she said, and laughed when she tried to imagine Acharya giving instructions for the daily message. It was a very feminine laughter, heavy with affection, Ayyan thought.

‘Not the Director,’ he said, ‘Administration.’ Oparna nodded.
Administration was a word everybody understood here, though nobody knew who it was or where it sat. It was an unseen being, like electricity, that made things work.

She was about to go to the corner stairs leading to the basement when Ayyan asked her, ‘Can you read Marathi?’ He showed her the paper. ‘My son,’ he said.

Oparna read with an honest curiosity that made him like her for a passing moment. Her lips silently mumbled some difficult words. Her long earrings, with a small blue globe suspended in each, trembled slightly. And he chose to see nothing more. He did not look at her proud breasts or how the wind was making her thin purple top stick to her flat stomach.

‘I can’t believe this. I didn’t know your boy was a genius,’ she said. ‘Won’t you bring him here?’

At the end of the third-floor corridor, just before the fateful door called Director, was another door. It said ‘Deputy Director’. Ayyan knocked twice and opened it. Jana Nambodri, who was in a huddle with five other radio astronomers, looked up with a grimace on his face. It seemed as if they were having a shadowy palm-on-the-candle kind of conference. Ayyan withdrew with an apology, but Nambodri’s face swiftly changed into a warm genial emptiness.

‘It’s all right, come in,’ he said.

Ayyan showed him the paper. It was put at the centre of Nambodri’s table and since only one of the astronomers could read Marathi, he read the news item aloud. Murmurs of surprise followed. They looked at Ayyan with smiles and mild astonishment. But, clearly, these men were nervous and distracted. Something was about to happen, Ayyan knew.

‘Isn’t this the same boy who asks his teachers why nothing travels faster than light?’ Nambodri asked.

‘He does?’ someone asked in disbelief.

‘Get him here,’ Nambodri said, ‘Let’s have a look at him.’ And that was it.

Ayyan went to his corner seat in the anteroom. In the morning odours of old cushion and detergent, a faint haunting smell
that usually reminded him of old sorrows, he switched on the various machines around him. He wondered what Nambodri and his men were up to. There was a sense of purpose on their faces. They had done something and were preparing for the consequences. The war against Acharya might have begun. The evangelists of alien signals against a dictator who believed that truth was usually not so dramatic.

Arvind Acharya bumbled down the interminable corridor, suddenly reminded of his daughter in the days after she was born. He would sit at the edge of her mother’s bed and stare into the crib. Some days, he would imagine the world through her eyes and he would feel in his heart how long an hour actually was. As a proportion to the fragment of life his daughter had seen, an hour was a vast sprawling place. What appeared to be an hour to him, he calculated then, must have been one thousand five hundred adult hours to her. Time stretched or contracted, depending on who was keeping it. It was a strange enchanting force. In a way, it did not exist unless it was comprehended. And that to him was the key to the Time problem. Time was clearly woven into another force, the force of perception. And perception was the virtue of life alone. So he wondered if life was a fundamental element of the universe like Time itself. This line of thought had many holes, but he enjoyed it. He tried to imagine how a microscopic organism would perceive time. If its lifetime were a second, it would perceive the instant in a very different way from humans. It would live through its life feeling the sheer expanse of the moment, probably even getting bored sometimes.

He realized he was distracted by something, but he did not know what it was. It was a sound, a meek ugly voice that had none of the beauty of the thoughts it sought to abolish.

‘Sir,’ he heard someone say.

Acharya looked around and he realized he was at his door and a dark man with bright eyes and thick black hair neatly combed sideways was standing there with a newspaper and
speaking in the tongue of the defeated landless slaves from another time.

‘My son has appeared in the paper, Sir,’ Ayyan said in Tamil.

Acharya’s mind slowly emerged from the mist and began to understand what was being said. He grabbed the paper from Ayyan.

‘It’s in Marathi, Sir’ Ayyan said.

‘I can read Marathi,’ Acharya mumbled, and he read. He looked puzzled and asked, ‘Your son?’

Ayyan nodded.

‘Brilliant,’ Acharya said, ‘Why haven’t the English papers written about this?’ The giant read the story again. ‘I didn’t know there was a Department of Science Education in Switzerland.’

‘There is, Sir.’

‘Bring him here on Monday.’

‘OK, Sir.’

‘Take good care of him. Don’t ask him to become an engineer or some rubbish like that. Keep your relatives miles away from him. Do you understand?’

‘I understand.’

‘Let him be. Give him books, a lot of books. You can take anything you want from my shelf. And don’t just give him science books. Give him comics, too. If you need anything you let me know. And don’t forget, give him a lot of comics.’

A
PHONE RANG
on Ayyan’s desk. It was Acharya on the line. He wanted a print-out of an email. This was a routine instruction. Acharya preferred to read letters the old-fashioned way and had given Ayyan his email password – Lavanya 123. The dedication of passwords was the new fellowship of marriage. To each other, couples had become furtive asterisks. Nothing else had changed about marriages of course.

He printed the email of a man called Richard Smoot. In the subject line was the cryptic message – Qb3. At the start of the correspondence between the two, Ayyan did not understand the messages in the subject lines which carried codes like Nf3, a6 or something similar. Then he realized that when Smoot had sent his first mail enquiring about the possibility of Acharya delivering a lecture in New York, he had written e4 in the subject slot – the notation of a chess opening. It was customary, Ayyan eventually learnt, for some eggheads to mark the beginning of a dialogue, e4. Acharya, when he replied to the letter seeking further information about the lecture invitation, wrote e5 in the subject slot. Apparently, e5 was black’s traditional response to white’s e4. Smoot responded with the profiles of other speakers who had accepted the invitation, marking the subject as Nf3. Smoot’s knight was now attacking Acharya’s pawn. Acharya responded with Nf6 in the subject line. And now, the two insane men were not only in the middle of a long correspondence but also a fully fledged chess match.

A peon walked in and dropped a solitary courier letter on Ayyan’s desk. ‘For the Big Man,’ the peon said. ‘Mani,’ he then
said in a whisper, ‘I need a residence proof. I’m applying for a job in the Gulf. I’ve to make a passport now.’

Ayyan appeared thoughtful. ‘I’ve a friend who can help,’ he said. ‘Give me exactly two days.’

After the peon left, Ayyan studied the courier. It said in the bottom left-hand corner, ‘Ministry of Defence’. The Institute of Theory and Research came under the Ministry of Defence because it was originally created to conceive the Indian nuclear programme. The Institute eventually wrangled out of the programme, claiming that nuclear physics was an obsolete science and of too much practical use to enthrall the poetic hearts of theoretical physicists. But the Ministry of Defence continued to fund the Institute.

Ayyan toyed with the envelope. There was something about it. Though the Ministry sent most of its communications through email these days, it occasionally sent courier mail and speedposts. In the canteen, Ayyan had heard impassioned discussions of scientists on whether there was a hidden physical law that governed what the Ministry chose to email and what it chose to courier. They could not find a decisive pattern. But it was generally considered that bad news was almost always couriered.